The science of wine – Dave Jordan

The son of sheep and cattle farmers, Jordan has gone on to become an integral part of the New Zealand wine research team. Given his background he might have been tempted to head into the agricultural field – but that wasn't to be.

"I was very keen on outdoor activities" Jordan says, "so I loved horticulture. It also had enough layers of interest. Even though it was manual tasks I was doing as holiday jobs, there was also intellectual stimulus. I worked a couple of seasons with a strawberry grower, who had been the chairman of the Berryfruit Growers and another guy who had chaired the Vegetable Growers Association. These guys were my bosses and they showed me the opportunities within horticulture that could be on offer to a young person."

The fact that dairy, cattle and sheep farming were struggling at the time, while horticulture was booming, was another deciding factor when Jordan decided to undertake a Bachelor of Horticulture Science.

"I could see that there were job opportunities and it gave all this diversity that you could follow as a career – a whole range of opportunities. And it has translated to be that."

Following in his father's footsteps, Jordan headed to Lincoln University where he completed his degree with First Class Honours. But grapes weren't on his horizon at that stage. Having said that, he had a smattering of wine knowledge, given one of his lecturers was David Jackson, who had written one of the very first New Zealand wine production books, with Danny Schuster.

"So we got a small slice of viticulture and what it was like to work in the wine industry. But it was only part of a broader spectrum of horticultural crops."

Jordan hadn't been wrong in his early assessment that horticulture offered opportunities. On completing his degree, he had three serious job offers on the table that he had to choose between.

The one he finally decided on was based at Ruakura with MAF Research, where he worked alongside renowned viticulturist Richard Smart. Jordan's job entailed research into table grapes, while Richard was focused on wine grapes. But at times the research overlapped – as was the case when Richard wrote the book Sunshine Into Wine.

"I edited the book, I went through every word of his hand written draft. There were no word processors in those days and his writing wasn't the easiest to follow."

But the task at hand gave him an insight into the world of wine grapes.

After two years of working alongside Richard, Jordan headed to Oregon where he did his PhD at Oregon State University. Oregon at this time was a fledging wine industry focusing on cool climate varieties. It was a vibrant industry with many pioneers making their mark.

"I was starting to focus on grapevines at this stage and I wanted to learn more about bunch stem necrosis that affects fruit set. I studied the mechanism with my focus around the elevated levels of nitrogen or nitrogen compounds in the bunch and discovered if you had spikes of these compounds you had a poor fruit set and increased bunch stem necrosis."
By the time his PhD was complete, Richard Smart had decided to move back to Australia and Jordan took over his job at Ruakura. But times were becoming tough within the world of research. Funding was being cut and jobs were going by the wayside. He could see some difficult years ahead for scientists, particularly those with applied research programmes, and that was confirmed when in his words, "under my watch Te Kauwhata Viticulture Research Station was closed down. It wasn't a fun time".

"I had been trying to align the (research) programme with Marlborough as I could see that was where the future of the industry lay. This was 21 years ago – the writing was on the wall and Marlborough was it. I wanted to get the research embedded within the future of the industry."
With times being so tough in terms of research funding, Jordan began losing his enthusiasm for the job and in 1994 he decided it was time to make a move.

"So I set up Vine to Wine, my consulting business."

He was one of the very early practitioners in this field, mostly due to the fact the wine industry was still finding its own feet and relatively small. This was also the year that he wrote a report that would be acted on by the industry and would morph into what is now known and recognised as Sustainability Winegrowing New Zealand.

NZW had contracted Jordan to look at other sustainability programmes throughout the world. As part of that process, and based on an earlier visit to Switzerland, he examined the Wadenswil programme, and recommended that with suitable amendment a similar programme would provide an appropriate sustainability framework for New Zealand.

A pilot programme was launched in 1995 initially with five vineyards. Following that trial, and it being rolled out to all regions for two years, in 1998 The Integrated Winegrape Production (IWP) programme went 'live' with 120 participating vineyards and the first technical workshops were held. It is a project that Jordan is understandably proud of.

"I ran the front end of that scheme working with producers to field test the progamme and worked alongside NZW or the Wine Institute as it was back then to get it up and running. The whole structure we now have is based on that original report I made back in 1994."

With consulting to the industry body a minor part of his professional work, Jordan was also helping newbies to the industry establish themselves. Given he has been a consultant for 21 years, it is an indication of the regard he is held in, that many of those first clients are still clients today in 2015.

Over the years, he has consulted to all the major international wine companies, has worked with small boutique family run wineries, has assisted growers and helped develop business strategies for many of them. It is a satisfying career.

"It's seeing the start-ups, the companies that are working under the radar but have had phenomenal success. I have been with them from the time they were assessing the property, to helping lay out the vineyard and now how they manage the vines and take them through to the future. Some of these projects have been 15 years in the making."
But he has never forgotten his research background. He is heavily involved with the industry body and is a regular speaker at seminars and forums. Currently he has taken on the Programme Manager's role for the Lifestyle Wines programme.

Looking forward, having lived through the advent of phylloxera and mealy bug outbreaks, being the first to document the spread of the leafroll virus and goodness knows what other threats vines are constantly under – Jordan feels there are two challenges facing the wine industry.

One is vineyard longevity.

"It has been a hot topic for me for some time, but we have a long way to go. It is great to see the investment the industry is putting into continuing to improve our understanding in that space. Because if we can get another five years out of a Sauvignon Blanc vine, then it is worth a lot of money to the industry."

The other challenge he feels we are facing is how to continue to keep New Zealand wine fresh in the eyes of our world-wide consumers.

"How do we say (to our consumers) that we are still new and vital so keep with us, rather than move to the next more exciting opportunity?

"That is why I am so passionate about the Lifestyle Wines programme – it shows we are continuing to evolve. It shows our distributors and retailers that have been loyal to us, that we are moving forward to keep their business moving forward. It is a unique opportunity to define a new wine category on the world wine stage and for New Zealand to command premium positioning within this category."